Month: January, 2014

This time, I started really early: since gluing stuff onto other stuff using mod podge doesn’t require thinking skills, I managed to do the backgrounds sometime in October, when I was stuck at home with pneumonia. Since remembering to take pictures apparently does require brain activity, I didn’t take any pictures during my epic glue-a-thon. I forgot.

Fast forward to a week and a half ago: after having thought about what I wanted to do and drawing a terrifying blank for months, I was ready to give up on the whole thing. Since that would be 1) a shitty beginning of the new year and 2) a waste of all my fancy backgrounds, I worked my magic (read: I honestly have no clue what I did) and voilà: A Concept.

I decided to go for a selection of pictures taken in 2013, subdivided in 5 categories: adventures, animals, Clark Cat, street art, and pics because it happened. It took quite a while to narrow the themes and the pictures down, but once I did, I had a clear vision of what the book was going to look like. For some reason, a couple of the pictures were printed not quite as I had wanted them (edges were cut off), but since I had zero time to figure out why that was and/or get them reprinted, I went with my new mantra, which is “done is better than perfect”. Also, I figured that I know what the pictures are supposed to look like, other people don’t.

After pasting all the photo’s onto the pages, I wrote descriptions that I printed out. I then realised that I had NO CLUE where I’d left my special crafting cutting boards, since I’d put them away sometime in October, while having a fever. So, keeping with the “done is better than perfect” theme, I just grabbed one of the cutting boards from my kitchen and cut everything into shape freehand.

When everything was done, I first scanned all the pages, then took pictures of all the pages and only then bound the whole thing together. It turned out extremely thick and unfortunately also quite fragile: had I had more time, I would have figured out a way to actually rebind the whole thing with a back and such. Now I just stuffed it into an envelope, ran to the supermarket to post it and hoped for the best.

The sketchbook has already arrived in Brooklyn (in less than a week!) and will be scanned, I will of course post a link as soon as one is available. For now, a photo set of the process containing a sneak peek can be found here: click!

Thank you for helping me out with my survey, you know, the one for actual trufax science! This weekend, I will be compiling the data and draw very scientific conclusions, that I will use in a presentation and an essay. A post about The Sketchbook Project 2014 (with pictures) is also in the works.

As you all know, I am a student of English Language and Culture, which basically means that we do (a tiny amount of) language, literature and linguistics. I now have to do research for one of my linguistics classes, so I have created a survey. I am looking for 20 participants, 10 with Dutch as their first (/native/L1) language and 10 with English as their first language.

The survey contains 64 – 67 questions (depending on your first language). This seems like a lot, but The Big Kahuna (= my mom) managed to get trough them in 6 minutes, which means that it will take other people between 12 – 15 minutes, because TBK does everything twice as fast as, well, everybody else in the world.

If you’re now going “AWESOME! I LOOOVE SURVEYS!” or “Sure, I’ll do it, so that you’ll finally finish your studies and stop being such a curmudgeon bitter bitch”, you can get to the survey by clicking here:

First of all: a happy 2014 to everyone! I actually made a sorta kinda resolution this year, which is not be such a bitter bitch when it comes to my studies. I started off on the right foot by making this my new school bag: